It’s not easy to have the time and effort to create homemade from-scratch, fresh, nutritious natural meals for every meal of every day. This is what Andy and Rachel Berliner had in mind when, in 1987, they developed Amy’s Kitchen, a line of healthy, organic frozen and convenience foods and meals.

If you’ve stepped foot in a frozen section in the past five years, you know Amy’s. Andy and Rachel were organic vegetarians back before you could find much besides whole grains and produce, and realized when Rachel got pregnant that they wouldn’t have much time to shop and cook the sorts of foods they liked to eat. They sampled a number of all-natural frozen meals they considered sub-par at best. So they developed their own, starting with a vegetarian pot pie that quickly became the best selling frozen pot-pie in the market, and named the company after their newborn daughter, Amy.

For many years, Andy and Rachel ran the company out of their own house and barn, before having to build a special facility. Amy is now a young adult in college, and her parents’ line of over 80 frozen meals, pizzas, snacks and more makes them the largest natural and organic frozen/convenience food company in the world, commanding over 70 percent of the organic frozen food market.

From their kitchen in Petaluma, California, just north of San Francisco, and their brand new facility in Medford, Oregon, near the Oregon-California border, Amy’s Kitchen whips up everything from organic pasta sauce to frozen pizzas to entire meals of Indian food, Asian food – anything you can imagine. Every item is free of preservatives and contains no meat, eggs, trans fat, or partially hydrogenated anything. They have a wide variety of options that are lactose-free, gluten-free, cholesterol-free, or vegan.

Andy and Rachel are still strongly involved in the company – Andy takes care of marketing and sales, while Rachel coordinates the design of every package, reads every letter sent by customers, and is the “master taster” for each product.

All told, Amy’s employs over 750 people, including one of Amy’s grandmothers (who writes for the website and the packages), Rachel’s brother, and Andy’s brother. Even Amy is now a part of the company, coordinating her own part of the website with a blog and educational activities for younger eaters. Amy’s Kitchen remains a family company, through and through, despite how much they’ve grown in the past 20 years.

Amy’s has succeeded by bringing natural, delicious, inexpensive products to the freezer cases and grocery store shelves. Keeping the cost low and the food convenient means you don’t have to labor or spend a lot to get quick, nutritious, natural foods on the table. This makes Amy’s products a perfect match for New Seasons Market.

To learn more about Amy's Kitchen go to http://www.amyskitchen.com.